National Institute Of Child Health And Development

The largest, longest and most comprehensive study yet of the effects of child care on infants' development has shown no significant correlation between nonmaternal care and the emotional attachment infants feel for their mothers.

A week after a high-profile study cast a negative light on child care, researchers--including the study's lead statistician--are sharply questioning whether their controversial work has been misrepresented. As reported last week, the study showed that the more time preschoolers spend in child care, the more likely their teachers were to report behavior problems such as aggression and defiance in kindergarten.

A week after a high-profile study cast a negative light on child care, researchers--including the study's lead statistician--are sharply questioning whether their controversial work has been misrepresented. As reported last week, the study showed that the more time preschoolers spend in child care, the more likely their teachers were to report behavior problems such as aggression and defiance in kindergarten.

I What is it about teaching reading that arouses such passions in Americans? Shall we have phonics or whole language or both? Why this debate should be so vehement in the political arena is not immediately obvious. Nor is it obvious why the issue is so important that George W. Bush, for example, has been running television ads prominently featuring phonics, as though it were a topic as central to the presidency as social security, taxation, trade with China or nuclear weapons.

I What is it about teaching reading that arouses such passions in Americans? Shall we have phonics or whole language or both? Why this debate should be so vehement in the political arena is not immediately obvious. Nor is it obvious why the issue is so important that George W. Bush, for example, has been running television ads prominently featuring phonics, as though it were a topic as central to the presidency as social security, taxation, trade with China or nuclear weapons.

International Remote Imaging Systems Inc. has been awarded a $485,000 two-year research grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The Chatsworth-based business will take part in a project to help develop more accurate computerized analysis of chromosomes for the study of inherited diseases. The company is a maker of urinalysis devices and imaging systems used in hospitals and clinical and genetic labs.

Providing new evidence that moderate exercise is good but too much may be unhealthy, researchers reported that highly trained male runners have a hormonal abnormality found in patients with depression and anorexia nervosa. The researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Bethesda, Md.

Parents who put their babies in bed with them are not reducing the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development said in the August issue of Pediatrics. The report said bed-sharing may increase the risk because softer ordinary beds may lead to stomach sleeping and suffocation.

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development is offering a free booklet on Fragile X syndrome, the most common genetically inherited form of mental retardation. The gene that causes the syndrome was only discovered in 1991. The booklet contains information on the physical and behavioral characteristics of children with Fragile X, the types of mental and language disabilities that the children experience, and ways of dealing with these issues.

Research used to justify a return to a "back-to-basics" method of teaching U.S. children how to read is flawed, according to a study presented at a national reading conference in Orlando. The traditional phonics method teaches children to sound out words, as opposed to the so-called whole language approach in which children learn to identify words through their context in sentences or stories.

The largest, longest and most comprehensive study yet of the effects of child care on infants' development has shown no significant correlation between nonmaternal care and the emotional attachment infants feel for their mothers.

The smallest premature babies, already at high risk of brain damage, are likely to develop even more mental disorders if they get any infection in the first weeks of life, researchers said. The babies face increased chances of brain injury and ailments such as cerebral palsy, according to a study by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The study of more than 6,000 extremely low-birth-weight infants is in this week's Journal of the American Medical Assn.

The simple act of putting babies to bed on their backs instead of their stomachs may be the reason for a 30% drop in sudden infant death syndrome in the United States, a federal study says. Dr. Duane Alexander, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development in Washington, D.C., said the dramatic change in the rate of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS, has to be attributed to a campaign to bed babies on their back "because nothing else has changed."